Making War on the Draft

One summer night in 1863, an angry mob surrounded the house of James Sill, the draft enrollment officer for Marion township in Putnam County, Ind. Sill had a list of eligible men whom he intended to draft into the Army. The mob, dozens strong, was there to take it from him, by force if necessary.

The Civil War was the first time in American history in which the government resorted to a draft. In the eyes of 19th-century Americans, drafts were incompatible with the liberties of a free people: European monarchs might conscript their armies, but Americans fought their wars with volunteers. Yet volunteering failed to keep pace with the two sides’ manpower needs. The Confederacy instituted its draft in 1862. In July of that year, the Union passed a Militia Act, which contained a provision allowing the secretary of war to draft militiamen. Congress did not pass its first draft law, the Enrollment Act, until spring 1863.

The Enrollment Act’s primary goal was to stimulate volunteering. Each rural township or city ward had an enrolling officer responsible for compiling a list of men between the ages of 25 and 45. From those lists, the provost marshal’s office would determine each district’s quota. If a community could meet its quota through volunteers, no draft would be held. As a result, once the quotas were announced, townships or cities would try to stimulate volunteering, often offering bounties. When the deadline for meeting the quota arrived, according to the historian Eugene C. Murdock, “the districts which had made their quota rejoiced in relief, while those that had failed stiffened themselves for a draft.”

Enrolling officers like James Sill thus found themselves on the front lines of the Union draft. It was Sill’s responsibility to travel his district, collecting names and asking questions necessary to verify a man’s age (he was not required to verify anything other than age, even though marital status or disability affected one’s eligibility for the draft). Before the war, Sill had enjoyed the respect of Marion Township, where he served as justice of the peace and notary public. But his support of the war had already proved costly, even before the mob showed up on his doorstep. Despite 27 years of membership, he had stopped attending his local Baptist church because of the congregation’s antiwar sentiments.

Such sentiment was common in areas of the North, like Indiana, where people had strong economic and family ties to the South, disliked the increasingly emancipationist aims of the war, objected to the Republican Party’s economic agenda and distrusted Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties in the name of preserving the Union. To them, the Enrollment Act was merely another unconstitutional attack on the liberties of a free people.

In addition, rural laborers like those in Putnam County were more vulnerable to the draft than city dwellers, according to the historian Tyler Anbinder. The Enrollment Act permitted men to avoid the draft by either purchasing a substitute or paying a $300 commutation fee. When the commutation fee was repealed in 1864, the price of substitutes became prohibitive. In Putnam County, for example, it rose to over a $1,000 by the end of the war. Farmhands often lacked the money for commutation or purchasing a substitute. Not only were rural residents too well known in their communities to disappear, as might their urban counterparts, but also men who did heavy farm labor would find it difficult to convince a doctor that they were physically unfit to serve.

Enrolling officers like Sill began to canvass their districts in the spring of 1863 just as the anti-draft reaction was building. The historian Jennifer L. Weber calls Indiana “the most tense and violent state” as the draft went into effect, but resistance to the enrollment also occurred in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and New Jersey. In mid-June, Matilda Cavens wrote to her husband, a soldier from Putnam County, that “the draft is being resisted all over the state,” and mentioned several attacks on enrollment officers like Sill.

One Putnam County enrollment officer was informed by a committee of four men “that if he continued the enrollment … he would find himself a dead man before he got through.” In another township, the draft officer received a note signed “your friend,” warning him, “If you don’t lay aside the enrolling your life will be taken before to-morrow night.” In yet another township, the enrollment books were stolen, although there was suspicion that it was the enrolling officer himself who had destroyed them because he was “not all right on the war question.” In Cloverdale, the provost marshal’s first choice as enrolling officer declined the job, probably because “vengeance is declared against the man who enrolls the militia of this township.” And the Jefferson Township draft officer, confronted by a mob, was forced to surrender his papers.

In Sullivan County, Ind., antiwar Democrats resolved to “resist the draft, by force of arms, if necessary.” They considered the draft unconstitutional, “and they would not obey it.” An assistant provost marshal in Indiana believed that, in Sullivan and Greene Counties alone, there were 1,500 men drilling to resist the draft. Two enrolling officers were ambushed and killed in Rush County, Ind., and another in Sullivan County. Professor Weber found that the Provost Marshal General Bureau reported 38 enrolling officers killed and 60 wounded throughout the country.

James Sill would fare better than many of his counterparts. One Sunday evening in June, Sill’s daughters, Candace and Harriet, were entertaining gentleman callers. Upon leaving the house, the suitors encountered a mob of men. Candace reported 300 men surrounding the house, although later accounts put the number closer to 50.

Related

One of the suitors gave the alarm. Unknown to Sill, the women of his family had hidden the enrollment papers. Candace initially concealed them in a salt barrel, but then her mother, Elizabeth, moved them into another room. When the mob approached, Elizabeth grabbed the papers and ran out the back. She then stuffed them under a board the Sills had laid down as a path between the house and the outbuildings. Caught by two members of the mob, Elizabeth stood on the board while they searched her.

Meanwhile James Sill, with Candace at his side, confronted the men at the front of the house. Although Harriet had fled to a neighbor’s house, Candace vowed not to leave her father’s side, even though she thought it likely he would die “bravely defending the government papers.” The mob gave Sill three minutes to produce the enrollment list or die. Candace recalled that she berated the men, calling them “every low thing I could think of for several minutes,” while her father brought the papers. Of course, he did not have the current list, but instead produced one made for the previous year’s militia draft. Sill threw the papers down at the feet of the mob. Candace held up a lantern and tried to see the men’s faces. “One young man stepped forward,” Candace recalled, “pulled his coat up over his head, took [the papers] from the floor and sprang back into the crowd saying ‘We’ve got them; let’s go.’ “

Because Sill and his family members recognized members of the mob, the military was able to make arrests. In September 1863, 37 cases of conspiracy and resisting the enrollment in Putnam County were heard in the United States District Court in Indianapolis. Sill was a witness. The jury found the first defendant, Joseph Ellis, guilty, and the judge fined him $500. The defense attorney then asked the prosecution to drop the conspiracy charge in return for the remaining defendants’ accepting a guilty verdict on the charge of resisting the enrollment. Three cases were dismissed, and the remaining defendants paid fines of up to $25. The governor of Indiana ordered a medal made to honor Elizabeth Sill, but she refused to accept it.

Some attacks on enrolling officers were spontaneous, as women defended their men from enrollment officers, just as Elizabeth and Candace Sill had protected James Sill and his papers. Men set dogs upon enrolling officers who came to the house, and women sometimes tossed pots of hot water on them. In Boone County, Ind., women threw eggs at an enrollment official. But it was well known that the attacks on James Sill and other Putnam County enrolling officials had been planned in the law offices of a local judge, where a military company had been organized to resist the draft. The Copperheads were not through with Sill. At the beginning of 1865, he received an anonymous note threatening that his “harts blud shall pay dear” if he carried out another draft.

The New York City draft riots, in which over 100 people died, became the most famous example of draft resistance in the North. That week of violence in New York was, to that date, the most deadly riot in American history. But its history has overshadowed the widespread draft resistance that took place throughout the North, from Indiana and Illinois to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Wisconsin. Even New Hampshire called its militia out to enforce the draft. As the historian Joan E. Cashin has written, “there was a great deal of small-scale violent resistance” to the draft. It had not seemed small-scale to the Sill family when their house was surrounded by a mob, but the attack on James Sill exemplified the nature of Midwestern anti-draft violence.

What's Next

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.